
Luke Batterham
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A RARE LETTER BY THE GREAT RESTORATION PLAYWRIGHT: in all the originals of some fifty-six letters by Congreve are known, from a total of about seventy-five of which the texts are known. Ours is from the series of forty-four letters Congreve wrote between 1697 and 1712 to Joseph Keally whom he had met in 1685 when the two attended Kilkenny College together. All but one of this series was published in Literary Relics by George-Monck Berkeley, the great-grandson of Rebecca Monk Forster, Keally's sister-in-law. At some after 1789 the collection was dispersed. At present the originals of thirty-three of the letters are unlocated, their texts known only from Berkeley. Ours is one of the hitherto lost originals (see Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, ii, pt. 1, 1987, pp. 137-9; and John C. Hodges, William Congreve: Letters & Documents, 1964, no. 40, where the Berkeley text is printed).